Thursday, March 01, 2007

Deadline 2: MET! (sort of)

I've been analyzing study 2 data like mad, well, not too obsessively, and given that when I set the deadline I failed to appreciate exactly how many more analyses I'd have to do for this study compared to the first, I wisely made an executive decision to ease up on my deadline for writing up the results.

I had 4 hypotheses to analyze, some with multiple parts, plus post hoc tests to run, and although I am done cranking out the numbers now, the one week turn around time I set for writing it all up wasn't going to be possible, not even with superhuman ability to avoid sleep with no deleterious effects!

The new deadline for the write up is now Monday, which is completely reasonable, and if I bust my butt so speak, I could even be done by the end of business hours on Friday, leaving the weekend open for tom foolery. My deadline for turning in the whole thing to my advisor was Mar 7 but I don't want to bang out the discussion in two days, so the new one is Fri, Mar 9. Four days to write a discussion is reasonable. The last time I wrote that intensely I had a bottle of red wine to help! I am totally prepared to go out and get a bottle of monkey Barrel Thief Red if I need to. Around this valley, the wine possibilities are endless, but I've had my eye on this one for quite a while. It's perfect for a primatologist writing about monkey stuff :=)

Whatever happens, I have all of my data analyzed now and have a pretty decent story to tell. Many of my predictions were born out with the data, including the most important one! I am very excited about that and think that I should be able to get it published somewhere, hopefully in a higher impact journal given the experimental protocol and sound theoretical foundation. Plus, my work is a genuinely novel contribution with relevance to multiple fields. I love it! I really do.

There are things I would do differently the next time around, including one major one, but I am not terribly worried about defending my work nor the future of my "research program." That major thing I would do differently? It's the next study. I should be able to have it up and running, pending IRB approval, this summer.

And, I have a paper under review now with another one co-authored with one of my thesis students sitting around waiting to be tidied up and sent out to reviewers. That paper contains an exciting discovery that I can use to bolster my dissertation discussion. Thank you Mr Sleyed for reminding me about that! He's so smart, it's like having another me around sometimes!

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About Me

I'm a papermaker, a newspaper editor, and have a PhD in primate social psychology — I guess you could say I am a paper expert! Toddler Field Notes and her two canine companions — both Newfoundlands — make frequent appearances here.